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ATschon There is much less intellectual diversity now than there was 100 years ago

> it's common to regard them both as left-wing ideologies

It definitely is common among people who want to advocate for far right beliefs but run into the slight issue of the most famous of those groups being culturally synonymous with evil. Simply defining the Nazis to the other side of the spectrum is a very convenient solution to that, and probably pretty convincing to most people who are usually not familiar enough with the history and politics of Weimar Germany to point out how utterly ridiculous of a statement that is. (The NSDAP was helped into power by the royalty-aligned conservatives to prevent a left victory, while the left fought the forces that would become the SS in the streets to try to stop them, before they were put into the first concentration camps. Coincidentally, they also sat on the furthest right side of parliament, opposite of the communists.)

ATschon There is much less intellectual diversity now than there was 100 years ago

Indeed, there's no lack of good faith arguments for what you could call "intellectual diversity".

For example, Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky talk at length about how the way our media is interlinked with corporations and governments steers the discourse toward a narrow range of ideas approved by those groups in their book "Manufacturing Consent". Mark Fisher decries a climate in which most people consider markets as the only possible solution for all problems in "Capitalist Realism".

However, because these authors can just be upfront about what their beliefs are, they aren't forced to argue for vague concepts like "intellectual diversity" and can instead be specific about the type of restrictions that are occurring and in the case of Herman and Chomsky even track them with real numbers, making for a much better argument.

ATschon There is much less intellectual diversity now than there was 100 years ago

Sure, but then continues on to decry the de-nazification of Germany and the shadowy "cosmopolitans" who imposed that by force and not the suppression of leftists by the US military, CIA and McCarthyism.

That's the trick, you just gotta put half a sentence about "both sides" into your article and then suddenly you're a centrist and your right wing drivel is now serious intellectual writing.

ATschon There is much less intellectual diversity now than there was 100 years ago

Curious, how the conclusion of the "intellectual diversity" argument is always that we should tolerate nazis more and never anything else, really makes you think.

(Cue the "I don't support nazis I just think that for the good of mankind, unfortunately, we need to do everything we can to support nazis, incidentally of course" script.)

ATschon I Bought Apple Silicon

People used to talk about Java in the same way people talk about electron now so I feel like that's a definite no.

ATschon I Bought Apple Silicon

> we are in a place where most development projects are really "stitching" dependencies together

Is there anything wrong with that, though? If there's any common thread in the history of computing, it's that progress happens when things become abstracted enough to allow for another layer of building blocks. That's not to say that those layers don't have a cost, or we don't need to learn how to do them well, but gluing together components is really all software development has ever been.

ATschon I Bought Apple Silicon

Given it's Jonathan Blow, I feel compelled to say yes.

More seriously, while program overheads have undoubtedly gotten higher, that's always been in exchange for something else, even if non-technical, like a better developer experience and platform support. Nobody writes slow programs on purpose, but people are very willing to trade it off for things that are more important in the grand scheme of things. Low level programmers love to smugly pretend that those tradeoffs do not exist but they do.

ATschon Rust 2021 Roadmap

I think the most accurate way to say it is that, while Rust compile times are not inherently slow, Rust has in most cases where where a desirable feature was at odds with compile times decided to sacrifice it. So while it is not inherently slow to compile, it was not designed to be easy to compile quickly either.

ATschon The Ampere Altra Review: 2x 80 Cores Arm Server Performance Monster

I personally expect those plans to be dropped or cut back relatively soon as Trump leaves office. I don't think the 2024 date for this plan was at all a coincidence. Taiwan is extremely shifty about their semiconductor tech leaving the island. Of course, 5nm would be very outdated by then either way.

ATschon The Ampere Altra Review: 2x 80 Cores Arm Server Performance Monster

I recall AMD mentioning that their Zen architecture is pretty generic and that it would not be hard to make it execute ARM instructions instead. AMD has worked on this before, although the project was canned, but there's been some rumors recently of it having been resurrected.

ATschon Jetbrains founders turn billionaires without VC help

Two more policy failures!

ATschon Fractal Architectures: A Software Craftsman's take to Infrastructure as Code

Surprised to see there's still people using the term "Software Craftsman" in a positive way.

ATschon How to Think for Yourself

Absolutely insufferable, I can't even hate-read this article.

ATschon YouTube Down

That makes sense to me, because dynamic pages are not served from a CDN, which do a lot more BGP and routing trickery that could go wrong.

ATschon YouTube Down

CORS errors are false positives for a large amount of causes. For example, if loading a website causes an 502 or other error, that might not set the required CORS header, thus making it illegal for javascript to access the response in a number of ways.

ATschon YouTube Down

It looks like it's a CDN issue, which might affect many things using GCP for large files.

ATschon YouTube Down

5 bucks on BGP

ATschon MI5 moves UK Terrorism threat level to “SEVERE”

I was thinking about the French "Vigipirate" system, which I think has "lowered" the threat level by defining higher levels at least two times now. For example I remember a few years ago, the second highest color level, red, was declared to be the now lowest level, "Vigilance". It has never been that low again since.

ATschon MI5 moves UK Terrorism threat level to “SEVERE”

It is a pretty good technique for expanding police powers. You allow them to do more stuff, but only when the level is high enough. Nobody will object because objecting to emergency measures looks bad. Then, whenever something bad happens you just increase the threat level. When you reach the top, "reform" the system to add higher levels.

ATschon MI5 moves UK Terrorism threat level to “SEVERE”

I think it's a bigger reflection of the fact that there is absolutely zero incentive to lower these alerts and that the police, who inform the threat level, generally benefit greatly from the "temporarily" expanded privileges from higher levels.

ATschon Women Using Less Feminine Terms in Cover Letters Are Less Likely to Get Hired

Thanks for this key insight, but I don't see how it's relevant.

The point, which I'm very far from the first person to bring up, is that the actual purpose of vague concepts like "culture fit" is to be a wildcard you can use to exclude anyone without having to critically examine or provide an actual reason. How you personally justify having pink hair not being a "culture fit" to yourself doesn't change anything about that. What it does change however is that you now no longer have to explain that you're not hiring someone for their hair color.

There's no need to invent hypotheticals, by the way. The people I've heard asking how they can stop getting denied for "culture fit" in interviews have one thing in common and it's being >40 years old or a woman.

ATschon Women Using Less Feminine Terms in Cover Letters Are Less Likely to Get Hired

In that case the problem is that you've hired someone that lacks the emotional awareness or worse doesn't care that they're making people uncomfortable with the jokes, not "bad culture fit". Whether someone cares about how their behaviour affects others definitely sounds like something that should affect a hiring decision.

ATschon We made our SaaS home page cookie-free

That's true, but in the context of a popup this means you must be able to deny or dismiss it without consequences.

ATschon Women Using Less Feminine Terms in Cover Letters Are Less Likely to Get Hired

Team cooperation is not something a cover letter can tell you. "Culture fit" is nothing but an incredibly transparent and convienient post-hoc justification for when you know you're only excluding someone for not looking or behaving enough like you but have to find some way to word it that doesn't make you sound bad.

ATschon We made our SaaS home page cookie-free

https://ico.org.uk/for-organisations/guide-to-pecr/cookies-a...

Here's what the UK Regulator says.

It's a bit unfortunate, there was a follow-up to this law that much improved the cookie nagging, but unfortunately it seems to have been stopped in it's tracks by lobbyists because of its restrictions on ad tracking.

ATschon We made our SaaS home page cookie-free

It's extra fun because there's really two options:

a) the cookies are necessary for technical reasons. This means you don't need to ask for permission

b) the cookies are for marketing, which means you must be able to decline without consequences

Half of the banners do neither of these things and are thus either unnecessary or insufficient.

ATschon Women Using Less Feminine Terms in Cover Letters Are Less Likely to Get Hired

I think this is very good and should be done more. Unless you're hiring someone to write cover letters, they're a distraction that measures an irrelevant skill and is mostly useful as a way to introduce an incredible amount of biases into the hiring process early.

See also: attaching pictures, "hobbies" section and other irrelevant personal details.

ATschon Goodbye, Twitter

This is a great endorsement of Twitter, but unfortunately they are much more tolerant towards hate mobs than this post would imply.

ATschon NAT Slipstreaming

I totally agree. But the amount of pressure required is incredibly big. As in, Google has been trying it for years in the Android world and is only seeing success now with drastic measures that vendors hate, like forbidding use of any kernel patches outright.

ATschon NAT Slipstreaming

The bigger problem with these is usually not the vendor of the router, but the vendor of the SoC the device is built on. SoC vendors will usually provide you with a linux kernel that has an incredible amount of frequently shoddy out of tree patches and tweaks which make it very hard to rebase to a new version even if you really wanted to.